Adan Castañeda was arrested May 27, 2011, after firing 23 bullets into his parents' home in the Texas Hill Country. On the capital murder and tampering-with-evidence charges, State District Court Judge Dib Waldrip declared Castañeda not guilty. Castañeda was declared not guilty by reason of insanity on charges of aggravated assault, deadly conduct and criminal mischief.

By Michael Barajas, Houston Press
March 10, 2015

Maria Esparza awoke to what she thought was the sound of her husband
cooking -- the hiss and pop of fresh vegetables dropped into a pan of
hot oil. Reality set in when Roy Esparza told her to keep her head down
as bullets cracked and whizzed through their two-story home in the Texas
Hill Country.

"There's something going on," he told her. "I think it's your son."

Roy dialed 911 and reached a Comal County dispatcher just before 4
a.m. on May 27, 2011. Somebody had just sprayed the house with bullets,
he told the dispatcher, who told him to stay put inside. The dispatcher
asked if anyone had recently threatened them. "Yes, our son," Roy said
before hesitating.

"I don't know...I don't want to say it was him. He's paranoid schizophrenic. He's been diagnosed. He came from Iraq."

Roy handed the phone to his wife, who gave the dispatcher a
stripped-down version of Adan Castañeda's steep mental decline since
he'd returned from war three years earlier. Sounding more exhausted than
frightened, Maria told the officer her 25-year-old son had been in and
out of psychiatric treatment. He's mentally ill, she said. She told the
dispatcher about the bizarre text messages she'd received from Castañeda
that had only grown more violent and disturbing in recent weeks.

He's been to the local U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hospital -- many times, she stressed -- but they won't keep him.

Deputies quickly found Castañeda wandering a dark stretch of road
less than a mile from the house. His gait was sluggish. Playback of the
police dash-cam video looks as if it's in slow motion.

One deputy muttered "Oh, shit" into his radio when Castañeda reached
his right hand into his waistband, pulling out a .45 caliber Glock
pistol. Holding it at his side, Castañeda sounded confused during the
standoff.

First he told deputies he was just wielding a paintball gun, then a
BB gun. "I'm not going to hurt anyone," he said in a low monotone,
before grabbing the gun by the barrel with the palm of his hand,
throwing it overhand into the nearby trees. Officers eventually
discovered the gun some 25 yards away.

The deputies remembered Castañeda. Nearly two years before, some of
them had been called out to a standoff inside his parents' home.
Castañeda tore through the house, ripping out cabinets, shattering
windows and smashing television screens. All because his parents took
away his gun after he threatened to kill himself.

After that July 2009 blowup, Castañeda was sent to his first
commitment at the Audie L. Murphy Memorial VA Hospital's psychiatric
ward in San Antonio, beginning what would become a revolving door of
treatment and release. Castañeda would be committed to the psych ward at
least two more times. He tried to check himself in on another occasion.
Weeks before he peppered his parents' house with bullets, his mother
tried to get doctors to commit him once more; they said they couldn't
take him.

While it remains unclear exactly why the VA was either unable or
unwilling to offer Castañeda and his family more help (a VA
spokesperson's only response to questions from the Houston Press was,
"We are not conducting interviews at this time"), his case bears an
uneasy resemblance to that of another troubled veteran whose violent
breakdown dominated national headlines last month. On February 24, an
Erath County jury sentenced Marine Corps veteran Eddie Ray Routh to life in prison for brutally killing famed Navy SEAL "American Sniper" Chris
Kyle and his friend, Chad Littlefield. By all accounts, both Castañeda's
and Routh's families sought help through their local VA hospitals --
Castañeda in San Antonio, Routh in Dallas -- but were turned away days
before their psychotic delusions reached their ultimate, violent
breaking points.

The cases are dramatic examples of how war, mental illness and an
overwhelmed VA can intersect with the criminal justice system. It's
unclear how many veterans are currently incarcerated, but the most
recent survey, done by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2004, found
that nearly one in every ten inmates in American jails had prior
military service. Those veterans, the survey found, were more likely
than nonvets to have been treated for mental health problems before
their run-ins with the law.

Last month, on the same week and in the same state, attorneys for
Castañeda and Routh argued their clients were insane when they committed
their crimes and were therefore better candidates for treatment than
for prison. Only Castañeda prevailed. In court, he grew visibly
agitated, wanting desperately to take the stand, to persuade a judge he
was simply defending himself against evils that existed only in his
head.

The night Castañeda sent bullets flying through his parents' house,
the responding deputies sound rattled on the radio call log. "I'm almost
to the point where I'm second-guessing, why didn't I shoot?" one says.
He looks like that Marine we've seen before, one of the deputies says
as Castañeda's taken into custody. "He won't talk...He's got like a
freaking blank stare."

Photo courtesy of Maria Esparza

After
high school, Castañeda joined the U.S. Marine Corps and in 2007
deployed to Iraq with the 2nd Battalion 5th Marines Scout Sniper
Platoon.

Adan Castañeda was born in the South Texas city of Edinburg, less
than 20 miles from the Mexico border. Back then, his mother, Maria
Esparza, was married to someone she calls "an abusive man, a pedophile"
who sexually assaulted Castañeda.

When he was about four years old, Castañeda's mother fled with her
children to the Texas Hill Country north of San Antonio. By the time
Castañeda was eight years old, his mother had married Roy Esparza, her
current husband. Things were relatively calm until Castañeda's brother,
Alonzo Garza, who was three years his junior, entered middle school.
Teachers caught Alonzo bringing pot to school. He once stole a golf cart
from a local store, taking it for a joyride in the woods. Maria got
worried when school officials began to wonder whether Castañeda, too,
was a problem child.

The summer before his senior year, Maria sent Castañeda to a summer
camp at the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen; she thought he'd enjoy
the pilot lessons. Castañeda returned, finished out his senior year
living with his sister in San Antonio and, with no other plans for his
future, decided to join the military. He was dead set on joining the
U.S. Marine Corps. "Real men join the Marines," Maria recalls him
saying.

Castañeda insisted on becoming an infantryman. He hated the idea of
being stuck in a dull desk job. After he finished basic training, he
relished the missions that took him to Guam, Thailand and the
Philippines. He started collecting canisters of dirt from the places
he'd visited.

Castañeda eventually became a scout sniper, joining the 2nd Battalion
5th Marines Scout Sniper Platoon before deploying to Iraq in March 2007
as part of a surge of U.S. troops onto the battlefield.

The details of Castañeda's deployment became part of a letter he
later sent the VA contesting his disability rating. In it, Castañeda
gave a scattered recollection of firefights, explosions and carnage
that's at points difficult to follow. There are, however, a couple of
unifying themes in what he wrote. Whatever Castañeda saw clearly weighed
on him, and the overwhelming feeling of imminent danger and
helplessness never really dissipated.

"I was repulsed by what I saw...I felt that death was so close, and that I would soon die, but it didn't happen."

Castañeda and his mother spoke regularly before and during his
deployment. But after he returned to California's Marine Corps Base Camp
Pendleton in September 2007, he rarely called home. Then, in February
2008, Maria got an unusual phone call from her son.

Claiming he'd been in a training accident, Castañeda wanted to make
sure his mother still had him listed on her health insurance. Later that
night, Maria got a call from a doctor at Saddleback Memorial Medical
Center. Castañeda had been put in a psych ward. "Is he always this
paranoid?" she recalls the doctor asking her.

In his letter to the VA, Castañeda wrote he'd been drinking heavily
the night before, passed out, woke up and then, in a daze, decided to
take his own life. He claimed he'd attempted suicide at least twice
before. He'd slashed his arm with a razor, but then had second thoughts,
he wrote. He patched his wrist with a T-shirt and duct tape before
asking a friend to drive him to the hospital.

Doctors at the California hospital wrote that Castañeda suffered from
paranoia and suicidal ideation. Records indicate the hospital told base
officials about the episode. In his letter to the VA, Castañeda wrote,
"Nobody ever talked to me about having been in the psych ward."
Castañeda says that higher-ups did, however, remove all sharp objects
from his living quarters.

In the months that followed, Castañeda emailed lengthy
paranoia-fueled screeds to Alonzo. "Mom, we've got to get him out of the
service," Maria remembers Alonzo telling her. "He's losing it."

Castañeda was honorably discharged in December 2008; none of his
discharge paperwork makes any mention of mental illness or his suicide
attempt. He drove straight through the night from California to Texas,
and moved into an apartment with Alonzo and his two young nieces.
Castañeda was, by all accounts, a doting uncle.

Family, however, began to notice that Castañeda's mood had shifted
radically since before his deployment. In February 2009, on Castañeda's
birthday, Maria brought a cake to his apartment. He was sitting in the
dark, sipping from a gallon jug of water. "I don't celebrate birthdays,"
he told her. He threw the cake in the trash.

Castañeda became obsessed with security. He bought his brother a gun,
insisting he needed it for protection. Weeks later, on March 9, 2009,
Brendon Ashley Griffin, 24, shot and killed Alonzo Garza in the
apartment while Castañeda slept upstairs -- a police report states that
upon finding his brother's body, Castañeda grabbed his gun and fired a
bullet into his bedroom- door before punching holes in the walls of the
apartment. (In 2010, Griffin, who unsuccessfully tried to raise his own
insanity defense, pleaded guilty to murder and aggravated assault in exchange for a 30-year prison sentence.)

Castañeda disappeared after his brother's death. He didn't go to the
funeral. Weeks later, he called his mother from the Bexar County jail.
Blackout drunk, he'd totaled his car, smashing it into a guardrail.
Maria remembers he wasn't wearing shoes when she bailed him out.
Castañeda's face was bruised. He'd been in a fight he couldn't remember.

Photo by Josh Huskin

Less
than a month before Castañeda fired on her house, Maria Esparza filed
an emergency application to commit her son to a VA psych ward in San
Antonio. Doctors there wouldn't take him.

Castañeda moved back in with his parents. He floundered for weeks,
unable to keep a job or sleep through the night. A doctor prescribed him
Valium; when his parents later found him in a daze, he said he couldn't
remember why the bottle was empty. He started drinking large amounts of
cough syrup. One night, the cops called Maria saying they had found
Castañeda wandering around an H-E-B parking lot, fumbling and attempting
to get into cars.

Castañeda routinely kept a pistol by his side. His temper was getting
worse. In the middle of the night, he'd bang on the door to Maria's
room, demanding the keys to her car. Maria wondered whether the local VA
could help. She had a cousin who worked there, so Maria called to ask
for advice. She was both confused and unnerved by what her cousin told
her: Keep calling, don't give up, don't let them say no to you.

One night, Maria asked Castañeda why he couldn't shake his diet of
cough syrup, Valium and Red Bull. He grabbed his pistol and pointed it
at his face. "It's what keeps me from doing this," he told her. Maria
ran into the garage, and, after she managed to stop crying, called the
VA crisis hotline. Someone at the other end of the phone told her she
should consider taking the guns out of the house, so the next day, while
Castañeda was out on an errand, that's what she and his stepfather did.

When Castañeda returned to find his guns were gone, he went on a
rampage through the house, smashing everything in sight. He frantically
called 911, saying he needed protection; one report says he used
"extreme profanity" with a dispatcher. The outburst was so intense it
triggered a standoff with a SWAT team outside.

"I'm thankful he wasn't
shot," Maria says. One responding deputy wrote in his report that
"Castañeda's mental state was very unstable."

Castañeda was arrested and -- after many, many phone calls to
veterans' groups and local politicians, Maria claims -- was committed to
a VA psych ward in San Antonio. Doctors kept him there for nearly two
months, prescribing him antipsychotics such as Zyprexa and lithium,
along with mood stabilizers to calm him at night.

"He reported that he
thought his mother was trying to kill and poison him," according to
hospital records.

But once he was declared stable, Maria didn't really know what to do
with her son.

She certainly didn't think he was ready to be out on his
own. He refused to live with his parents, and the VA wouldn't put him in
counseling, she claims.

Maria found Castañeda an apartment near the VA hospital so he could
easily take the bus there at a moment's notice. But public
transportation proved too confusing. Late one day, Castañeda called his
mother, saying he'd missed his stop on the way to the hospital. He was
too anxious to talk to the driver. He'd been riding around the city for
most of a day.

Castañeda struggled to stick to the treatment doctors had outlined
for him. Sometimes he'd take none of his medication. Or he'd take too
much and throw up; Maria regularly had to bring a carpet cleaner to his
apartment to handle the vomit.

"He couldn't regulate himself," she says.

By July 2010, a year after his first VA commitment, Castañeda began
to isolate himself further. He told his mother he no longer felt safe
around her. He sent her delusional text messages in all caps. One day,
maintenance workers at Castañeda's San Antonio apartment complex called
Maria. They'd noticed the apartment was leaking and knocked on the door.
When Castañeda opened up, they saw that parts of the apartment had
flooded with water, the treadmill was running full speed and the
refrigerator door was open with no food inside. Castañeda was disheveled
and dazed. He kicked them out and wouldn't let them back in.

Maria filed for a mental health warrant, and San Antonio cops dragged
Castañeda out of the apartment when he started to furiously punch holes
in the walls. He was again taken to the VA psych ward; it's unclear how
long they kept him that time.

In October 2010, Castañeda started texting his mother that government
officials were planting dead bodies all over his apartment. She drove
to the apartment where he was staying and found him sitting in the dark
in an almost catatonic state. He could hardly speak, so she took him
back to the VA hospital. Records indicate he was diagnosed with
post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoid schizophrenia. Two days
after he was committed, according to hospital records, Castañeda tried
to escape. Maria says he punched through a window and ran to a nearby
gas station, but when he looked down and saw his badly mangled hand,
Castañeda turned back around and sought medical attention at the
hospital he'd just escaped.

Despite three escape attempts, doctors kept him there for less than three weeks.

Maria says Castañeda never seemed to stabilize. In the winter of 2010,
he even tried to admit himself to the VA psych ward, saying he didn't
feel safe at home; Maria told him she was proud of him. One time, he
took a taxi from his San Antonio apartment to his parents' Hill Country
home, saying he didn't feel safe alone.

"I don't know how to change this," he told her.

By the end of April 2011, Castañeda's mind had descended into
something beyond recognition. The text messages he sent to his mother
grew increasingly dark. He talked about having sex with dead bodies,
about eating his own feces and drinking his own urine.

On April 29, 2011, Maria filed for a warrant to commit Castañeda
again to the VA psych ward. She wrote that while Castañeda hadn't yet
tried to seriously harm anybody else, "I am afraid he will harm
himself...by killing himself."

The VA hospital, however, wouldn't take him. Records indicate
Castañeda "knew how to answer their (doctors') questions so that he
would not be committed." Maria got a sympathetic text from one of
Castañeda's doctors at the VA: "I am so sorry."

Castañeda's text messages to his mother got even more disturbing
after that, taking on a twisted, violent and sexual tone. One night,
Maria sent Castañeda a message saying she loved him. "Lets all get
together and shoot ourselves in the head," he replied. On May 5, 2011,
he texted her, "Stop contacting me or ill take a taxi tn ur house and
kill u and roy and just go to jail."

Maria showed those text messages to investigators on that morning of
May 27, 2011, after Castañeda took a taxi 30 miles north of San Antonio
to her Spring Branch home, stood in the driveway, raised his pistol,
emptied a clip into the house, reloaded and fired again.

When Comal County sheriff's detective Steve Morris visited Castañeda
in jail shortly after the shooting, Castañeda was eager to talk.

Doctors would later guess that Castañeda's delusions were, at least
in part, caused by "exposure to trauma during military service." In his
mind, past abuse and serious mental illness, perhaps exacerbated or
triggered by the paranoia that accompanies post-traumatic stress, had
morphed into a strange conspiracy.

In his interview with Morris, Castañeda says his mother wouldn't stop
"sexually harassing me," that Maria and her husband were violently and
sexually abusive to their nieces. He urges the detective to investigate;
he'd seen his parents beat, choke and molest the girls before leaving
them to die in the middle of the highway, he insists. He'd seen it all
happen, he claims, but couldn't stop it -- "I was sedated and couldn't
think of what to do...I'm just going to call the cops every day when I
get out of here until they do something."

In the interview, Castañeda tells the detective that Maria and his
stepfather were plotting against him. He claims Roy told him "he's going
to kill me with my own gun and make it look like a suicide." His
mother, he says, "tells me to kill myself." He tells Morris he heard
voices telling him to shoot them.

Castañeda tries to convince Morris the bullets he fired at the house
were warning shots -- none of the rounds hit the northwest-corner room
where Maria and Roy slept, a deliberate choice, according to Castañeda.
By the time he talks to Morris, he's not only unrepentant but wondering
whether he should've taken things even further.

It was a mistake not killing them, he says. "Now I know that 30 years
in prison is worth two murders. I'll do 60 years in prison."

Castañeda sat in solitary confinement at the Comal County jail for
more than six months, even though a judge declared him incompetent to
stand trial and ordered him into treatment at the North Texas State
Hospital in Vernon -- what some pejoratively call "competency camp."
After hearing about the case and how a mentally ill veteran had
languished in an isolation cell for months, attorney Keith Hampton
fought to get Castañeda a bed in the overwhelmed, backlogged state
hospital system in late December 2011. Hampton became Castañeda's
attorney soon afterward.

The case dragged on for more than three years. Following his arrest,
Castañeda was initially booked on two charges of aggravated assault with
a deadly weapon and one count of deadly conduct. Comal County District
Attorney Jennifer Tharp, however, added two charges of attempted murder.
She also added a tampering-with-evidence charge because Castañeda had
tossed his gun into the woods that night.

Hampton says he couldn't come to any agreement with prosecutors over
an insanity plea; he wanted Castañeda put in indefinite treatment
somewhere; they wanted him in prison. Hampton says he scrambled to look
for other options that might appease the DA's office. He called
veterans' courts in the surrounding counties to see if he could transfer
the case; none would take Castañeda. Someone at the VA in San Antonio
suggested Hampton try to get Castañeda into an inpatient treatment
program for veterans with serious mental illness at the Waco VA. That
didn't work, either.

"I came up zero on everything, and I worked for months," Hampton
says. "The problem is this: Everybody runs their own little narrow
program, and if you don't fit perfectly within their criteria, then
you're left out."

Both before and after his arrest, Hampton says,
Castañeda fell through the cracks -- either because he simply didn't fit
any program or because his family couldn't adequately navigate the red
tape to find him long-term inpatient treatment. The recent scheduling
scandals at VA hospitals across the country only further point to a
rigid bureaucracy that can barely keep service at current levels, let
alone expand it, Hampton says.

Two days before Castañeda's trial, prosecutors agreed to allow a
judge to decide the verdict in the case; Hampton had gone to a movie
theater that Friday to watch American Sniper in preparation for a jury trial.

In court, prosecutors argued that Castañeda knew right from wrong
when he fired on his parents' house. He'd proven he wouldn't willingly
take any medication he was prescribed for long, they argued -- Castañeda
told one doctor who evaluated him that he was allergic to "all
psychotropic medications."

At trial, assistant district attorney Chari Kelly insisted, "Being mentally ill is not the same as being mentally insane."It's an argument Erath County prosecutors made during last month's trial of Eddie Ray Routh.

By most accounts, Routh struggled after his discharge from the Marine
Corps in 2010. However, unlike Castañeda, Routh never received a Combat
Action Ribbon, and, according to a Washington Post analysis of his
service record, it doesn't appear Routh ever engaged in direct combat
during his six-month deployment to Iraq. Still, Routh's attorneys have
claimed he suffers from PTSD and paranoid delusions (in a 2013 New
Yorker story, Routh's father recalled his son ranting about
"off-the-wall shit" like Dracula and werewolves). He flew into a rage
when his parents suggested he sell his guns. He bounced between
commitments at a private hospital and a Dallas VA psych ward. In late
January 2013, Routh's mother begged VA doctors to recommit him; she says
they wouldn't.

Days later, Kyle and Littlefield picked up Routh to take him shooting
at a gun range near Glen Rose. "this dude is straight up nuts," Kyle
texted Littlefield, who responded, "Watch my 6" -- watch my back, in
military parlance. At the range, Routh shot Kyle five times in the back
and once in the side of the head; four bullets struck Littlefield in the
back, one in the face and another at the top of his head. Routh stood
over their bleeding bodies, reloaded Kyle's 9mm handgun and fled in
Kyle's truck. [This is the story the prosecutors told but the evidence doesn't support it.]

Last month, the doctor who treated Routh at the Terrell State
Hospital testified in court that Routh was clearly psychotic, suffering
from multiple delusions: He thought his cop neighbor was a member of the
Mexican Mafia; he thought co-workers were cannibals who wanted to eat
him; in the days before he killed Kyle and Littlefield, he thought a
race of pig-human hybrids was taking over the earth.

Erath County prosecutors, however, called two expert witnesses who
claimed that, despite multiple hospitalizations for mental illness,
Routh was faking it. A jury took less than three hours to find him
guilty on both murder counts, sentencing Routh to life in prison
(Routh's lawyers filed an appeal in the case earlier this month). [The defense experts deny that he was faking it, as does Dr. Phil, who interviewed Routh's parents and sister after the verdict (video below).]

During Castañeda's first stint at "competency camp," doctors wrote
that delusional beliefs permeated any discussion they had with him about
his shooting. Castañeda urgently asked the doctors to investigate his
claims that his mother, stepfather and the government were conspiring
against him.

All three forensic psychiatrists who interviewed Castañeda wrote that
he suffered from serious delusions brought on by mental illness. Two
wrote that he was, in all likelihood, insane at the time of the
shooting. It appears the state's expert, Dr. Gregory Paul, disagreed
with that finding on a technicality (Hampton calls it "hairsplitting").
Castañeda, Paul wrote, didn't think his nieces were in "imminent danger"
when he fired a barrage of bullets at his parents' house. (Castañeda
didn't think his parents were actively abusing the girls at that very
moment, but did think that they'd done so in the past and would continue
to do so, Paul wrote.) When asked whether he feared for his life the
moment he shot at the house, Castañeda told Paul he was "not sure."

Still, Paul wrote in his report:

"Although I do not believe that the
defendant meets the criteria for criminal insanity" as defined by Texas
law, "it is clear that this shooting was the product of severe mental
illness, poor insight, and non compliance with treatment."

Castañeda, Paul wrote, was not faking it.

Castañeda's case sat in limbo for so long that he cycled back into
"competency camp" at the North Texas State Hospital when a judge
declared him incompetent to stand trial for a second time. Bouncing
between jail and a psych ward, he sent a judge overseeing his case long,
paranoid letters.

"I pray you that you can understand why I was compelled to resort to
such measures," he says of the shooting. "I reacted to a valid threat on
my life in self-defense."

He assures the judge he still believes in
following the military rules of engagement. "Once a Marine, always a
Marine."

When deputies led Castañeda out to the defense table at his trial on
February 17, it was the first time his mother had seen him in months.
She audibly gasped at the sight of him. His face was almost skeletal,
with bony cheeks and deep, sunken eyes.

Castañeda gave his mother a sheepish wave before turning to face the
judge. He stared down at his feet while a prosecutor read the charges
against him. Afterward, with slurred speech, he stood and said, "Not
guilty to those charges, Your Honor."

After the first day of trial, Hampton, his attorney, said, "He's
barely keeping it together." Castañeda desperately wanted to testify in
his own defense. He didn't particularly want to argue insanity; at
times, he still thinks the shooting was justified.

Castañeda became increasingly agitated the second and final day of
trial. He kept telling Hampton that he felt he needed to explain some
things to the judge. "It was, of course, all nonsense," Hampton says.

In his closing arguments, Hampton put a PowerPoint presentation up on
the screen inside the courtroom. Castañeda grew angry as Hampton made
his final push to convince the judge that his client was insane. Castañeda groaned loudly, saying something inaudible. Hampton calmed him
down, and silently clicked through the rest of the presentation,
staying on each slide long enough for the judge to read its contents.

On the capital murder and tampering-with-evidence charges, State
District Court Judge Dib Waldrip declared Castañeda not guilty.Castañeda was declared not guilty by reason of insanity on charges of
aggravated assault, deadly conduct and criminal mischief.

Sometime this month, Castañeda will be transferred from the Comal
County jail to the North Texas State Hospital for treatment; it's
unclear how long he'll remain there. Six days after Castañeda's verdict,
a jury ruled that Eddie Ray Routh knew right from wrong when he killed
Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield.

The two Texas men are in some ways mirror images of each other. Each
was hospitalized numerous times for mental illness after returning from
war. On February 17, in courtrooms on opposite ends of the state, both
mothers testified how the VA discharged their sons in the days preceding
their violent breakdowns and how they unsuccessfully urged doctors to
recommit the men.

The cases diverge in other important ways. Routh killed two men;
Castañeda's two victims are his greatest advocates. A jury sent one
Marine to prison for life. A judge sent the other to a mental
institution.

Against that backdrop, friends and supporters have made sure to
congratulate Maria on the outcome of her son's case -- treatment over
prison. It's an odd sentiment that's hard to process, she says. "It's
sort of hard to hear...He's mentally ill, he doesn't want to be mentally
ill and we've just wanted him to get proper treatment for all of these
years."

Most nights, Maria speaks to Castañeda over the phone as he sits
inside the jail. Castañeda is still delusional, she says. He's now
convinced doctors are trying to kill him and views what has happened to
him as a government conspiracy instead of the product of mental illness.

1 comment:

I am a former US Marine and US Navy Officer with a Combat Action Ribbon as well as service connected disabilities. I am also a Republican. I have also served with, and am friends with, dozens of combat veterans who suffer daily from various injuries and wounds to include PTSD. I recently read your comments related to PTSD in which you attempted to excuse your son’s arrest on domestic abuse charges and firearm charges by referencing his supposed PTSD. Based upon your previous comments I am not surprised that you would choose to use this very serious condition as a political football and, once again, attempt to divert blame from your own family’s abhorrent, violent behavior.

In 2014 your entire family was involved in a late night ‘drunken brawl’ at a party in which Track Palin (the accused domestic abuser) was involved in a bloody fight. While you publicly stated how proud you were at your children’s violent actions, maybe this should have been a sign that Track has a problem. It is certainly curious that you did not feel the need to reference his supposed PTSD in this situation and instead stated: “…my kids’ defense of family makes my heart soar!” Maybe, instead of encouraging Track’s violence, you should have taken the opportunity to get him help. Maybe, instead of being the result of PTSD, your son was simply trying to uphold the stated Palin family values and “…make your heart soar” by abusing a woman.

PTSD is stigmatized in the media and not well understood by the general public. An estimated 22 veterans commit suicide every day in the United States. This is nearly 8,000 veterans who take their lives every year. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) stated: “Every day in the United States, 22 veterans succumb to suicide — losing their personal battle to invisible wounds of war.” Veterans who have willingly given so much in service to their country should not have to bear the burden of being further stigmatized by your ignorant and foolish statements.

While I do not propose to speak for all veterans, I am clearly not alone in my views regarding your unfortunate statements. They were unfortunate for the many veterans who face further disdain and discrimination based upon your inaccurate and ignorant portrayal of those who suffer with PTSD as well as the causes of the condition. While I would personally prefer that you simply avoid public life and simply fade away, if you insist on trying to use your “celebrity status” for a cause, please educate yourself on the facts of PTSD and try to help veterans by using your significant influence in a more productive, and less political manner. There are a number of veteran’s organizations to which you can donate time, money and energy to make a difference. Two organizations you may want to consider is the Marine Reconnaissance Foundation and the Recon & Sniper Foundation.

The New World Order Plan is spiritually based: it is a conflict between God and His forces, on the one hand, and Satan and his demonic forces on the other side. Anyone who does not know Biblical doctrine about God and Satan, and who does not know Scriptural prophecy, cannot comprehend the nature of the struggle facing the world today. - David Bay, Cutting Edge Ministries

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. - Ephesians 6:12

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence... Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. - President John F. Kennedy, April 27, 1961

The Bible

Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

The book in which they are embodied was first published in the year 1897 by Philip Stepanov for private circulation among his intimate friends. The first time Nilus published them was in 1901 in a book called The Great Within the Small and reprinted in 1905. A copy of this is in the British Museum bearing the date of its reception, August 10, 1906. All copies that were known to exist in Russia were destroyed in the Kerensky regime, and under his successors the possession of a copy by anyone in Soviet land was a crime sufficient to ensure the owner's of being shot on sight. The fact is in itself sufficient proof of the genuineness of the Protocols. The Jewish journals, of course, say that they are a forgery, leaving it to be understood that Professor Nilus, who embodied them in a work of his own, had concocted them for his own purposes.

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